The top 10 tech 'fails' of 2013

By Doug Gross, CNN

Updated 8:46 AM ET, Sat December 28, 2013

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HealthCare.gov rollout – The Affordable Care Act has been a hallmark of President Barack Obama's time in the White House. But it sure didn't get off to a smooth start when the website used to access the plan stalled in its crucial opening days. What was initially thought to be sluggishness due to heavy traffic turned out to be dozens of bugs that took nearly two months to fix. Heavy hitters from Silicon Valley were brought in for a "tech surge" -- raising the question of why they weren't involved from the beginning.

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Twitter Music – There's a thing called Twitter Music. Don't feel bad if you didn't notice -- you're not alone. Announced with fanfare on "Good Morning America" in April, the service suggests bands you might like based on who you follow. But it never gained traction on a Web seemingly happy with its Pandoras and Spotifys. A promised Android version never followed the iOS rollout, and reports in recent months say it could be scrapped any day.

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BlackBerry's free fall continues – The once-mighty BlackBerry seems to make this list every year now. In 2013, the Canadian company hit a sobering milestone when its once-dominant devices accounted for less than 1% of the smartphone market. Plans to sell the company fell through, 4,500 layoffs were announced in September and CEO Thorsten Heins was shown the door in November. Not a good year.

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Surface struggles – It felt like Microsoft was on to something: a hybrid that paired the form of a tablet with the keyboard and souped-up specs of a laptop. But the Surface has, thus far, failed to put a scare in the iPad. This summer, Microsoft had to take a nearly $1 billion write-off because of unsold Surface tablets. Don't count them out yet, though: Second-generation Surface tablets are out and getting improved marks from reviewers.

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Reddit names wrong guys – Crowdsourcing solutions to all sorts of problems has been an increasingly valuable Web tactic. But sometimes it goes the other way. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings in April, well-intentioned Reddit users pored through video, photos and other documents in trying to identify the attackers. What they did instead was surface the names and images of several innocent people who were put under intense and unfair scrutiny. The site noticed. When a similar subreddit sprang up in September to help find the Washington Navy Yard shooter, Reddit quickly shut it down.

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Yahoo e-mail – The big headline was a massive outage in December that denied millions of users access to Yahoo e-mail for nearly a week. But many already weren't happy with the two overhauls that Yahoo mail had gotten earlier in 2013. CEO Marissa Mayer has made improving e-mail one of the keys to righting the ship at Yahoo. But, so far, the efforts have pretty much just served to annoy and inconvenience the users they already have.

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Facebook's 'phone' – Rumors of a "Facebook phone" had swirled for a couple of years when, in April, the company rolled out Facebook Home. It wasn't a phone but a suite of apps that turned Google's Android operating system into a more Facebook-centric experience. Users didn't really see a need for it. The HTC First, the first (and probably only) phone pre-loaded with Home, sold so poorly that the company slashed its price from $99 to $1 in less than a month. Several other Android phones can be modified for Facebook Home, but there have been few takers. (Side note: We still love Chat Heads).

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Smartwatches -- too soon? – Wearable tech was a big story in 2013 and smartwatches were at the forefront, with offerings from Samsung and Sony joining smaller players like Kickstarter sensation Pebble. The problem? Nobody really likes them yet. We'll call this one an "incomplete." While first-generation smart watches don't do all that much, there's hope that future offerings (included a rumored one from Apple) make the technology more useful.

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Web hoaxes – From fake Twitter feuds to less-than-truthful sob stories, 2013 had more than its fair share of viral Web stories that turned out to be fakes. Whether it's all of us being gullible suckers, a business model that rewards websites for speed over accuracy, or a combination of both, pranksters and hoax-peddlers had their way with us again and again this year.

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Social-media meltdowns – The year's most epic social-media fail went to the Arizona restaurant that was made to look completely bonkers on "Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares," then proceeded to look even more nuts in a flurry of irate posts on its Facebook page. Among the posts from Amy's Baking Company Boutique & Bistro were threats of legal action against "Yelpers," "Reddits" and "fat, disgusting losers," along with claims that they were tracking people down with the help of the FBI. We're not sure how many folks saw the original show, but millions more formed their own opinions after the social-media meltdown.

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Story highlights

In 2013, the HealthCare.gov website topped our list of tech 'fails'

Twitter Music was a rare misstep for the hot social platform

Yahoo's e-mail troubles irked users

The "year of the Web hoax" saw us believing in bunk

"Fail fast." It's a mantra you hear in the tech-startup world -- a reminder to chase your dreams even if you need to pick up the pieces and start from scratch every now and then.

Of course, some failures work out better than others.

This year saw its share of technology-driven missteps. Some were rare slip-ups by usually reliable tech titans. Others were folks who crashed the world stage via the Internet's powerful echo chamber, got lambasted for their efforts, then disappeared to presumably never be heard from again.

Among them all, it wasn't hard to fill the top spot on this year's list of "tech fails."

There are lots of arguments for and against the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama's signature health care law that has opened access to insurance for millions of Americans. But there's no debating that the rollout of its website, where millions of people would presumably sign up for care under the act, was a disaster.

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Some painted it as a stark contrast between the nimble, flexible world of Silicon Valley startups and the unwieldy snarl of Washington bureacracy. Regardless, the glitch-filled launch gave critics of the plan plenty of ammunition at a time when supporters would have preferred to be extolling the virtues of the health care plan.

Of course, the full-time techies weren't perfect this year, either.

After unveiling its successful video app, Vine, Twitter launched an uncharacteristic clunker in Twitter Music, a streaming tool that nobody seemed to notice.

Once-mighty BlackBerry watched its dwindling relevance erode to almost zero in 2013, while Microsoft learned that taking on the iPad isn't easy as its Surface tablet struggled to find an audience.

Yahoo's tinkering with its e-mail service frustrated users -- although not as much as a handful of major outages. And Facebook learned that being the world's most popular social network doesn't mean people want a smartphone that's been reskinned with Facebook features.

Smartwatches were part of one of the year's top tech stories, the emergence of wearable technology. But by the end of 2013, none of the devices had lived up to all the hype. Perhaps spoiled by the capabilities of their smartphones and tablets, many users felt the connected watches just don't do very much ... yet.

And it wouldn't be a year in the digital age without people using their Web access in regrettable, embarrassing and sometimes just plain stupid ways.

Be it overzealous crime-fighters on Reddit, restaurant owners ranting on Facebook or the rest of us leaping at the chance to believe, and share, phony stories, there were plenty instances of people posting first and thinking later.

Take a look at our Top 10 Tech Fails of 2013 and let us know in the comments if there are any you think we missed.